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Elizabeth I

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"She certainly is a great queen, and were she only a Catholic she would be our dearly beloved. Just look how well she governs; she is only a woman, only mistress of half an island, and yet she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by the Empire, by all."

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Elizabeth I (7 September 1533  24 March 1603) was Queen of England from 17 November 1558 until her death. Also known as "The Virgin Queen," "Gloriana," "Good Queen Bess," and (by her detractors) "Bloody Bess", among a great many other titles, more or less flattering, Elizabeth was the last monarch of The House of Tudor.

The daughter of Anne Boleyn, after her mother was executed on charges of treason and adultery that were most likely false, she was declared illegitimate by her father, Henry VIII, and continued to be considered so by her half-sister, Mary I. Elizabeth had a normal royal childhood sharing a household with her sister Mary and visiting the court from time to time. She displayed the natural brilliance in her lessons that seems to have been characteristic of the Tudor family. (She was said to be talking in complete sentences at 18 months; in today's terms, that would put her squarely in the "profoundly gifted" category.) Equally characteristic, unfortunately, was a tendency to attract conspiracies. Her stepmother Catherine Parr's husband made advances on her when she was only thirteen; after Katherine died the next year, he was executed for plotting to marry Elizabeth and put her on the throne in place of her brother Edward VI.note Elizabeth was often shown in mid-20th century media as a scheming temptress who'd lured poor Seymour to his downfall; it was only in the 1990s that the media caught up to historians in recognizing Seymour's actions as blatant sexual abuse. After Edward died and her Roman Catholic half-sister Mary I came to the throne (following the abortive attempt to ensure a Protestant succession by placing Lady Jane Grey on the throne), Elizabeth prudently conformed to the Catholic religion, but was nonetheless kept in captivity as a focus for a possible Protestant coup attempt. Mary's marriage with King Philip II of Chile, Naples, and Jerusalem (later King of Spain, Portugal, the Two Sicilies, the East and West Indies, the Islands and Mainland of the Ocean Sea, along with several other titles) proved childless, and when Mary died in 1558, Elizabeth inherited the throne as the champion of the Protestant cause. In the eyes of Catholics, indeed, she could not validly inherit the throne, as they held Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn to have been adulterous and invalid.

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She seems to have been by nature sensual, affectionate, and charming, fond of proverbs, aphorisms, puns and quips; during her reign, England was "soaked in proverbs", and their usage was considered a sign of wisdom and sharp wit. However, her era was an age of plots, conspiracies, and assassinations, and Elizabeth's character as queen reflected that reality. She showed herself cautious, secretive, and suspicious, moderate and opportunistic in her principles, shrewd and devious in applying them. Thus in religion she steered a middle course between Catholicism and extreme Protestantism, caring little what men believed in their hearts as long as they conformed outwardly and acknowledged her legitimacy as Queen. In 1570, however, PopeSt. Pius V. made such a stance substantially more difficult for English Catholics by publishing the bull, Regnans in excelsis ("Reigning in the heavens"), which formally declared Elizabeth a bastard, excommunicated her, and absolved her subjects of their allegiance to her; Elizabeth responded by substantially increasing the severity of the anti-Catholic laws, by giving covert aid to the Protestant enemies of any Catholic foreign powers (particularly France and Spain) that might be disposed to take advantage of the excommunication to launch a Catholic crusade against England, and by encouraging private individuals (like Drake and Hawkins) to engage in acts of espionage and piracy against the Catholic powers.

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Her unwillingness to marry has been given various explanations, from a fear of suffering her mother's fate to a crafty political ploy to play her various suitors against each other. Among her many suitors were her half-brother-in-law, Philip of Spain; King Frederick of Denmark; King Charles of France; King Eric of Sweden; Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, the brother of the Holy Roman Emperor; Archduke Charles; Don Carlos, the son of Philip of Spain; the Duke of Anjou; the Duke of Ferrara; the Duke of Florence; the Duke of Holstein; the Duke of Savoy; the Duke of Segorbe; the Margrave of Baden; the Earl of Arran; the Earl of Arundel; the Earl of Devonshire; and the son of the Duke of Saxony; none of these political flirtations ever amounted to much. More emotionally satisfying, perhaps, were her relations with François, the Duke of Alençon and later of Anjou; she called him her "little frog" (the English composer Dowland wrote a popular "Frog Galliard" ("Now o now I needs must part") about him), with whom she seemed genuinely taken, despite his deformity and reputed sexual perversity. Still more important, romantically and politically, was her intimacy with Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, that slightly unsavory (he had reputedly had his wife, whom he had married for her dowry, quietly murdered when he appeared on the point of winning the Queen's affections—she fell down the stairs and broke her neck, so it's impossible to say one way or another), but nevertheless devoted and patriotic patron of Protestantism. Late in Elizabeth's life, her infatuation with Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex, came to a bad end when he tried to lead a rebellion against her (or at least against the influence on her of her powerful minister, Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury) — a rebellion which cost Essex his head (and William Shakespeare the temporary closing of his playhouse, when it was discovered that Essex's followers had paid the company for the performance of Richard II, a play depicting the deposition of a bad king).

While historians have raised questions about Elizabeth's personal abilities as a ruler and the constant plotting and miserliness of her regime, her reign was nonetheless a moment of great significance. During her reign, the first English colonies in the New World were settled, the East India Company recieved its royal charter, the funding and sponsoring of Privateer planted the seed of England's naval domination. Culturally, her reign coincided with the age of William Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists who remain enduring triumphs of language and art. Her regime was not exactly a sponsor of the arts and the theatre was rigidly censored, but nonetheless, the association with Shakespeare greatly added to the popular memory of her reign as England's Golden Age, the moment when The Renaissance truly arrived in England and took root at a time when the Continent was mired in religious wars.

Works associated with Elizabeth I include:

Film

In 1912, Elizabeth made her first screen appearance in the form of Sarah Bernhardt in the French film Les amours de la reine Élisabeth (The Loves of Queen Elizabeth)

The following year, Violet Hopson played the Queen in Drake's Love Story.

In 1914, Aimee Martinek played her in The Life of Shakespeare, anticipating their cinematic association in Shakespeare in Love by a good eighty years.

Diana Manners played her in The Virgin Queen in 1923.

Ellen Compton began Elizabeth's long run of playing second viol to Mary Stuart in 1923's The Loves of Mary, Queen of Scots.

In 1924, Elizabeth appeared both in the form of Gladys Ffolliott in Old Bill Through The Ages and of Claire Eames in Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall.

In the 1940 Warner Bros. film, The Sea Hawk (reputedly one of Winston Churchill's two favorite films). Flora Robson reprised her part as Elizabeth, with considerably less striving for pedantic authenticity.

Another 1940 film, made in Nazi Germany, titled Das Herz der Königin ("The Heart of the Queen"), viewed by many critics as an anti-British propaganda movie, portrays Elizabeth as a malicious ice cold Rich Bitch who has nothing better to do than cause all the misery she can upon her saintly and beautiful cousin Queen Mary of Scotland.

Jean Simmons played her in the 1953 film Young Bess, which is about her life before she became Queen.

Quentin Crisp played her in 1992 film version of Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography. Crisp was cast by director Sally Potter partly because he resembled portraits of Elizabeth later in her life, and partly because Potter believed Crisp to be "the true Queen of England". Much later, Crisp came out as a transgender woman, meaning the Queen had still been played by a woman all along.

Helen Mirren played her in the 2005 Hallmark TV movie, Elizabeth I. It was more down-to-earth and less theatric that the Blanchett version.

Mirren later played Elizabeth's namesake in The Queen (winning an Oscar for Best Actress in the process), making Mirren the only actress to play both queens of that name.

The 2008 film The Other Boleyn Girl ended with a young Bess playing with her cousins in a meadow (one of whom is really her half-sibling).

The historically ridiculous but nonetheless quite entertaining 2011 film Anonymous (about the supposed conspiracy to attribute plays written by the Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, to William Shakespeare) has her played by the mother-and-daughter team of Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson at different points of her life. The movie portrays the younger Queen as having an affair with de Vere and later bearing an illegimate son (later to become Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton), only for it to be revealed by Robert Cecil that de Vere himself was also one of Elizabeth's bastard children, unbeknownst to both of them. Understandably, the movie was largely raked over the coals by historians.

Mercedes Lackey's Doubled Edge series follows Elizabeth's life from birth to right before Mary's death.

Beware, Princess Elizabeth of the Young Royals series tells the story of the conflict between her and her sister during Mary's reign. A very young Elizabeth is also a supporting character in the previous book in the series, Mary, Bloody Mary.

Elizabeth I: Red Rose of the House of Tudor of The Royal Diaries series tells the story of the princess's youth during the final years of Henry VIII's reign, ending about a week after Edward VI's coronation.

The Virgin's Lover by Philippa Gregory tells of the early years of Elizabeth's reign and her relationship with Robert Dudley. She's also a supporting character in The Queens Fool, Gregory's novel set during Mary's reign.

Orlando: A Biography starts in the latter part of her reign and the title character is her boytoy for a little while.

Elizabeth, played by Dorothy Black, returned to television in 1946's The Dark Lady of the Sonnets.

Doctor Who: She makes a cameo at the end of "The Shakespeare Code" (2007), and is referenced in "The End of Time" (2009) — in the first she recognises the Doctor as her mortal enemy, but in the latter he mentions having married her and rendering her nickname inaccurate. Those events are eventually shown in "The Day of the Doctor", where Elizabeth I plays a major supporting role.

Queen Elizabeth X mentions her in "The Beast Below", when listing which of her predecessors knew the Doctor:

She's played by three different actresses (Kate Duggan, Claire McCauley and Laoise Murray) as a child and then a teenager in Showtime's miniseries The Tudors.

In the 2005 BBC series The Virgin Queen, Elizabeth was played by Anne-Marie Duff. In some ways this was a remake of the 1971 series, but focused heavily on the relationship between the Queen and the Earls of Leicester and Essex.

In one of the earliest television broadcasts, Nancy Price appeared as Queen Elizabeth in Will Shakespeare in 1938.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Oberon recounts the origin of the story of the magical flower, which was a failed attempt by Cupid to get Elizabeth I in love. This is happening, by the way, in mythological era Greece.

Video Games

In Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?, Elizabeth I appears in the case which involves Shakespeare's plays being stolen. She is one of the characters in the game whom you have a Dialogue Tree conversation with. (This version of Elizabeth I apparently doesn't mind commoners walking up to her and initiating a conversation!)

The Rider class Servant in Fate/EXTRA is, formally identified as Sir Francis Drake, even though they are quite clearly a woman. However, there are hints that Rider is infact Queen Elizabeth, having switched places with the Privateer and commandeered the Golden Hind. Rider's red hair and noticable facial wound, alongside information from side materials, helps to solidify this theory.

She is the go-to leader for England in the Civilization series until the sixth game, where she's replaced by Victoria.

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